Electrical excitation of surface phonon-polaritons in III-V heterostructures: a Monte Carlo study

Abstract : The surface phonon polaritons (SPP) excitation by hot electrons of an appropriate two-dimensional gas could make possible to implement an opto-electronic device emitting around 10 THz. To quantitatively assess the SPP emission by inter-subband electron relaxation in a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well, accurate electron/SPP scattering rates have been included in a particle Multi-Subband Monte Carlo (MSMC) simulator. Our results suggest some possible optimizations to enhance the SPP emission in order to design new Tera-Hertz sources.